Predicting form and meaning: Evidence from brain potentials

•An ERP study on pre-activation of form and meaning during lexical prediction.•Cloze-dependent reduced N400s for anomalous words with semantic/form relatedness to target.•N400 reduction for form related words depended on SOA.•Evidence that form pre-activation is more limited than meaning pre-activat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of memory and language 2016-01, Vol.86, p.157-171
Main Authors: Ito, Aine, Corley, Martin, Pickering, Martin J., Martin, Andrea E., Nieuwland, Mante S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Brain
Comprehension
ERPs
Event-related potentials
Information processing
Lexical prediction
Reading comprehension
Semantic processing
SOA
Word form
Word meaning
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Summary:•An ERP study on pre-activation of form and meaning during lexical prediction.•Cloze-dependent reduced N400s for anomalous words with semantic/form relatedness to target.•N400 reduction for form related words depended on SOA.•Evidence that form pre-activation is more limited than meaning pre-activation.•The pre-activation pattern is consistent with prediction-by-production theory. We used ERPs to investigate the pre-activation of form and meaning in language comprehension. Participants read high-cloze sentence contexts (e.g., “The student is going to the library to borrow a…”), followed by a word that was predictable (book), form-related (hook) or semantically related (page) to the predictable word, or unrelated (sofa). At a 500ms SOA (Experiment 1), semantically related words, but not form-related words, elicited a reduced N400 compared to unrelated words. At a 700ms SOA (Experiment 2), semantically related words and form-related words elicited reduced N400 effects, but the effect for form-related words occurred in very high-cloze sentences only. At both SOAs, form-related words elicited an enhanced, post-N400 posterior positivity (Late Positive Component effect). The N400 effects suggest that readers can pre-activate meaning and form information for highly predictable words, but form pre-activation is more limited than meaning pre-activation. The post-N400 LPC effect suggests that participants detected the form similarity between expected and encountered input. Pre-activation of word forms crucially depends upon the time that readers have to make predictions, in line with production-based accounts of linguistic prediction.
ISSN:0749-596X
1096-0821
DOI:10.1016/j.jml.2015.10.007